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It was because Facebook practiced open allocation for engineers at the time. Essentially, you had a choice of teams and the manager would need to convince the
by disgruntledphd2 6y ago
It was because Facebook practiced open allocation for engineers at the time.
Essentially, you had a choice of teams and the manager would need to convince the engineer to work on the project.
At the time, ads was not a high status part of FB engineering, and as such, it was very difficult to get people to work on ads products.
- ForHackernews 6y agoIt's funny that people want to work at Facebook or Google but don't want to work on ads. In other companies, everyone wants to work near the profit center and avoid cost centers.
- rvba 6y agoBecause those projects are hard. It is much easier to make a greenfield project that will get 70% done and cancelled before anyone even asks to fix bugs.
- username90 6y agoCan't have been that hard if half an engineer was enough to do the job.
- simonh 6y agoThe half an engineer was just the last team member around, only doing essential maintenance to keep it working.
- username90 6y agoSo why allocate more engineers to the project when it was doing fine with half a head?
- kelnos 6y agoThe article states that they needed to rebuild most of it because the entire thing depended on a deprecated Chrome feature that could be removed at any time.
- rconti 6y agoBecause the collections agent for that technical debt hadn't called _yet_
- simonh 6y agoTo borrow a phrase from the investment industry, the fact that a ticking time bomb has never previously gone off is not always a reliable indication of future performance.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- throwawayboise 6y agoHard to imagine that anything responsible for 25% of revenue (billions of dollars, at FB scale) would not be seen as "high status" if not by the engineers, then by management.
- shaneos 6y ago[author] It wasn't. The plan at the time was to deprecate Power Editor and build a new version of Ads Manager. We undertook both projects simultaneously, with the plan being to keep Power Editor going until AM v2 was ready. Unfortunately that took too long, and since Power Editor was the only product that could ship all the new ads features, by the time it came that Ads Manager V2 was ready, Power Editor had 50% of revenue share and Ads Manager about 20%. So, in effect we rebadged PE as Ads Manager, pulled over some of the new features from AM V2 and called it done.
- shaneos 6y ago[author] This is very accurate. As the manager of the team I had to spend a huge amount of time trying to hire internally for it. No one came to FB to work on ads, they wanted to work on stuff that their friends used. I had to develop a smooth song-and-dance to get the right type of people interested. In the end, this served me very well in my career, being well practiced at getting engineers excited to join your team is a valuable skill.